Van Alstin writes about the hardships parents must feel when the fate of their child is left in their hands, and criticizes government policies regarding the inducement of death. His story is about parents who decided to bring their child off of life support, who happened to be able to breathe once the tubes were removed. This is when the government imposed on the privacy of the family’s personal matters and kept the parents from killing their child for their own comfort.
Perhaps the government should not step in when murder is about to take place in a domestic environment. According to this article, the peace of mind and feeling of closure is more important than a person’s life. When did we start to have the right to determine the worth of a person’s life? Maybe killing an innocent child is not actually murder if it is giving parents the closure they need.
If the young man were ready to die, he would have died when the life support was removed. The government imposes these policies to keep the innocent alive. Some people are evil enough to murder and use the removal of life support as a way out of prison time. This is why those laws are in place and should not be criticized when parents are not lucky enough for their son to die when they think he had enough time alive.
Sarah Waters
Freshman psychology major
A version of this article appeared in the Apr 6 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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Some context would be nice.
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It's a response to this article:
http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/15267/parents-deserve-control-of-children-in-vegetative-states
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I am more confused on what the point of this opinon piece is. Is the author trying to defend human euthanasia by family members for the person in a vegetative state, or condemn those who want that option as potential murderers? The content of the article is unclear and fragmented.
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Sarah, while I respect your regard for human life, I believe your view on this matter is very destructive and costly.
When children are left in a vegetative state, parents are burdened in two ways. The first is that they have no closure. As the Terry Shiavo case indicates, one can be left in a vegetative state for decades. Secondly, it is the parents who bear the financial burden. For parents in low-income environments, keeping their children on life-support can destroy them financially.
Thirdly, what constitutes life? If life is based merely on one's ability to breath, then it would be viewed immoral to kill plants or animals. Once one has lost the ability to perform cognitive processes, it is cruel to leave him alive.
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For parents in low-income environments, the state (unjustifiably) pays the expenses. It's called Medicaid. I'd claim it to be a wholly unConstitutional program. . . but that's a discussion for a different time. But even so, we're talking about a child - not a car. If my Ford breaks down and I can't pay to have the engine rebuilt every month, then I junk it and move on to the next. If your child breaks down, is it ethically acceptable to make the same decision? I'd contend not. . .
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Crap letter is crap. It's not murder to not go out of your way to save someone. It's neglect if you don't do your simple duty to be a parent and raise your kid. But if you kid needs artificial means to live, then it's not neglect/murder to fail to provide that sort of assistance.
Letting someone die is not murder. Stop being so self-righteous. I'd say that I would hope your future children require life support and drugs and feeding tubes to survive and you need to devote all of your time and money to paying for that. But I'm not an insensitive jerk who can't empathize with others, so I don't wish that on anyone.
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Then why say that at all. I would say that you are an "insensitive jerk," but that is degrading to you, and according to the Collegiate times I am not allowed to say that. Maybe for you though, an insensitive jerk is a step up to who you actually are. I hope that you have a wonderful life and that when you have children that nothing ill happens to them.
She was not saying that letting them die was murder. Did you read the article? She said that she thinks it is not human to kill someone if they are off life support and still breathing.
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'When did we start to have the right to determine the worth of a person’s life?'
When did we start to have the right to determine the worth of plant life? Animal life? The planet on which we live?
Humans are, by far, the most worthless of all organisms to populate this earth. We take without giving back, effectively destroying almost everything we touch.
Don't be speciocentric with your views of humans, human society, and human worth. Humans have nicely imbalanced our planet's ecosystem and the associated cycles, slowly draining the earth of plants, animals, and materials.
And as for murder? It is a trait in all of us that stems from our intense territoriality (both physical and abstract).
Seriously, the fewer humans on earth, the better. We are a mistake that nature is paying for dearly.
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Have you hugged a tree today?
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i'm not a treehugger by any means.
just pointing out that us humans are doing a great job of systematically destroying the planet, and thus, by comparison, are essentially useless organisms.
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If you don't like our species you get out. We are the best organisms on the planet for the very reasons you mentioned. We're evolutionary winners and winners get to do what they want. To borrow a Chomsky quote "The strong do as they wish while the weak suffer what they must." If we were inferior we would be slaves to nature instead we are bound only by the limits of our imagination and the strength of our will.
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Are you a moron?
Take a look at the earth - we are completely destroying it!
We are obliterating THE PLACE WE LIVE. And since we are spread out over all of it that we can feasibly inhabit, what happens next? We manage to kill ourselves. Does that make us winners, or just unfit dictators?
'We are bound only by the limits of our imagination and the strength of our will'
...aaaaaaaaand the society that we have created that counteracts both of those. In an ideal society, those would indeed be our limits. Yet have have screwed ourselves by creating a democratic society that is based around money.
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What you can obliteration I call enslavement. Mother nature tried to keep us in check and we beat her badly into submission. We change the land to suit ourselves and genetically modify species so we can live better. We grow crops in the desert and have harnessed the power of the atom. We're optimizing the planet for ourselves not obliterating it. Sure we're getting rid of some of the existing stuff but it's to make room for all the better stuff we made. We're not killing ourselves mankind has never been so well off. Don't even try to through that widely discredited Malthusian argument at me it does not hold up. No need to be a sore loser nature lost, we won get over it. Nature wanted us to hunt and gather instead we build cities and go to space.
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if you cannot accept that humans have animalistic instincts that allow things like murder to take place, you really should switch majors.
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I'm going to venture a guess that the author has never known someone in this situation.
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i would tend to agree with you; it is easy to sit back and say that 'murder is wrong.'
the dynamic completely changes when you observe and feel firsthand.
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i don't think the author was saying that removing life support is wrong. She was saying that to induce death following the removal of life support because the person is still able to breathe is wrong.
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yeah, no crap.
does that really change the fact that said person is (likely) living in a personal hell?
in the event that i was in a vegetative state, i would fully expect to be killed.
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"Some people are evil enough to murder and use the removal of life support as a way out of prison time."
She's saying families who don't keep their loved ones on life support are murderers. Anyone who has spent time in a hospital with a loved one on life support will tell you exactly the opposite.
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According to the original article, the parents chose to remove their child from life support after two weeks. When he continued to breath, they still wished to end his life. I have known a woman whose son remained in a coma and on life support for over a year after a terrible car crash, and suddenly recovered. I understand that the cost of keeping a loved one alive through life support can cause hardship both financially and emotinally, but if the people's son is able to breathe on his own without life support, shoudn't that be enough hope to continue fighting for their loved one's life?
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Breathing is not the only thing which needs to be taken into consideration, here. There are costs associated with feeding the child nutrients, since a person in a vegetative state cannot consume his food orally. That is pretty costly by itself.
Furthermore, if the family wants to continue keeping the child alive in that state, I believe they should have that option (even though I honestly believe it is cruel). However, the option should be available to induce death in a humane way (such as a lethal injection) in these situations.
By definition, a vegetative state implies that the child does not have any significant brain activity. Without the brain, the body is merely an empty capsule. What the author of this article calls "murder," I would call "mercy."
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But Mark, your assessment is clouded by the fact that you have not (thank God) had the experience of being in a vegetative state. Think of it this way - I think it'd be simply unbearable to be an idiot, so consequently I believe it to be humane to put to death all idiots so that they no longer have to suffer. You leave out of the equation the perspective of the child - and really, this boils down to a matter of contract law. Children can't make wills and don't have the right to make their own end of life choices. Ultimately, you have to come up with an objective standard to measure "the livability of life," but any such decision made without consulting someone who has come back from a vegetative state would be missing a crucial viewpoint. It's not prudent, in this sense, to PRESUME that those in such a state are in pain, or wouldn't want to be that way, or have no hope of recovery.
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Your point is valid. However, who should bear the cost of keeping the child alive? Should the burden be held by the parents or by the state? Assume for an instant that the child is in a coma, and two decades later he is still in that coma. Is it fair that the parents are still paying to keep him alive?
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From my experience with parenting (which is not much) but what I think of how my parents feel about me, I really don't think that they would let financial reasons make their decision whether to keep me alive or not. If there was ever hope that i would wake up, my parents would fight for me.
Now what kind of parenting do you plan to do? The kind directed by love and nourishment for your child so that they can have the full life you always thought they would have? Or do plan to parent as long as it is financially convenient?
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Van Alstin writes in his original article, "This same horrible government is allowed to step in as the moral arbitrator  despite no call for arbitration from involved parties  and make the decision to keep the body of this young man alive through completely artificial means." This is after he explained that when the life support was removed, the child kept breathing, and that they had to re-administer life support beacause "Under current laws the family is unable to induce a peaceful death."
Sarah writes in her article that following the removal of life support, the child kept breathing and "This is when the government imposed on the privacy of the family’s personal matters and kept the parents from killing their child for their own comfort." Reading the letter the first time, I thought the same as many of you-that her views on the removal of life support is that it's murder. However, reading the original article and spending further time on this (because who could think that's murder?!), Sarah says "killing their child" referring to inducement of death, or lethal injection.
While it wasn't written explicitly, it's there. It is easy to see the other way, but before wishing terrible things on this young girl's future family, or saying she’s incapable of empathizing with the family, please take more time and look into the actual article and frame her response around it.
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Murder has been legal in this country for 37 years.
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Have we really reached the point that supposed college students confuse Thucydides with Chomsky?
"The strong do as they wish..." is from the Melian Dialogue, contained in the _History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War_. Which should be some indication of how long this argument has been going on.
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